ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock Feature Key to Proposal
In choosing a new solution, assessing the university’s ransomware vulnerability and strengthening its preparation in case of an attack was top of mind. “I’m very aware that data backup is one of the last layers of defense against a ransomware attack, and I like having multiple safety nets because you never know when you
might need them,” said Brandon.
“As part of my proposal for a new backup storage solution, I listed out universities that were hit with ransomware attacks in recent years and how they dealt with the problem. By and large, the way those universities reacted to a ransomware attack was just to turn everything off. When I presented my proposal, I wanted to make our team aware of the risk and the reality of what’s happening. I pointed out that one of the universities had to shut everything off the week before classes started. I saw testimonials from students at that
university who were worried whether classes were going to run and if they should go somewhere else, which is a black eye in terms of public relations. It just creates an environment of chaos, and that’s the last thing any business wants,” he said.
Once the ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage system was installed at Franklin University, one of the first things that Brandon did was to set up the Retention Time-Lock (RTL) policy and do an RTL recovery test to simulate what an actual attack would be like, and then document it for the IT team in case they needed to use it in the future. “The test went well,” he said “I created a test share and then backed up data for several days and then deleted half of the backups to simulate an attack, and I saw that the backups that I had deleted in Veeam were actually still there in the ExaGrid retention Repository Tier, and then we ran some commands to actually restore the data as a new share. I like that there was a suggestion to do away with the existing share because if that were infected and we tried to ‘perform surgery’ on it, we may or may not be successful. That was a learning moment for me because it now we can really plan and we will know what to do thanks to the test.”
ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone Tier where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format, for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the repository where deduplicated data is stored for longer-term retention. The combination of a non-network-facing tier (virtual air gap) plus delayed deletes with ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock feature, and immutable data objects, guards against the backup data being deleted or encrypted.